So how, exactly, given the current complexion of Congress, would Hillary get her agenda – supposedly so realistic – enacted? Why would she have any better luck than Obama has had – Obama, who went way out of his way to cater to Republican prejudices (e.g., obsession with deficits, keeping health insurance in private hands, willingness to cut Social Security, etc.), getting nothing at all in exchange, except abuse?
And Denmark still has a king and queen, too - want some royalty, too?
How about their 11% youth unemployment? Admittedly, it is one of the lowest youth unemployment rates in the EU. Italy is almost 40% and France is stuck in the 20s.
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I am not a Bernie supporter but I love his positions. In a situation like this I am not interested in specifics. I want to know you are FOR something. I expect a candidate to work towards that goal as best as they can. If they get 50% of what I want then hallelujah … you are a success in my book. More than that is gravy and less than that is OK as long as something significant was done. I think Hillary can get closer to 50% than Bernie as President and THAT is why I want her to win.
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Obama’s accomplishments have all been incremental yet persistent. That’s the way politics works in the US. Slow steady progress that’s hard to notice on a daily basis, but adds up over the four to eights years a President is in office. That’s the legacy Hillary is likely to achieve as well. No Earth shattering reforms or revolutions, just slow steady progress that improves our lives and the County’s economic stability. It’s a very boring plan, but it works.
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[quote=“tim, post:7, topic:36413”]
Telling them what they want is rainbows and unicorns gets them angry, and when they are told by a baby boomer who was lavished in those same rainbows and unicorns their entire life, they get angrier still[/quote]
The problem isn’t what they want, it is how they expect to go about getting it. When Sanders is asked how he would get his policies through a republican house and possibly senate, all he can say is REVOLUTION!!! That answer makes even less sense when you realize that he has just now gotten around to supporting some other democrats, and if you are to believe his corruption angle, Sanders thinks many democrats need to leave congress. That’s not a plan, and is why people don’t take him seriously. How can you not see that it sounds just like the kind of answer Trump would give when asked for specifics?
Us: “How are you going to get the Mexicans to pay for the wall Mr Trump”
Trump: “They will or we will make the wall 10 ft higher.”
Us: " Umm…what!?! That doesn’t make any sense."
Just like Trump, Sanders thinks ideology and force of will trumps reality and a credible plan.
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One thing Clinton would probably do better than Obama would be to press any advantage she got and not be delayed waiting for non-existent compromises to show up. If Trump really does take a wrecking ball to the Republican Party, then with a some luck the Dems could take congress in 2016 or 2018. She’d still have to deal with filibusters in the Senate, but with her more modest goals she could get a lot of the Democrats agenda through.
Bernie on the other hand would probably waste such an opportunity pushing for single payer. In addition Clinton is raising more money for other democrats than Sanders to get them elected. That would make such an opportunity more likely to happen. If Sanders is to be believed, he’d be fighting the “corrupt” democrats as much as he’d be fighting republicans.
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Thank you for that. That is what infuriates me when Bernie fans scream about how Bernie is going to be just like FDR, when they don’t even read the history of why FDR was so successful - because of overwhelming majorities of Dems in Congress. Do they honestly believe that the Bernie “revolution” is going to occur with a divided Congress, or a totally Republican one? And then they’ll get all pissed off because Sanders didn’t do what he promised to do, and they won’t come out to vote in the midterms, and Dems will lose more seats, and the fucking cycle starts all over again.
FDR didn’t depend on unicorns and rainbows. He depended upon having an overwhelming majority of like-minded party members in Congress. Get off your fat asses and start voting in the off-year elections if you want that fucking “revolution”! And read your goddamned history! There’s this new thing called the Internet tubes that might help.
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But her dancing withstands the sands of time. Sweet Fancy Moses!
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The posit upstream-that this is supply side economics vs demand side- cavalierly (intentionally?) skips the eight years of Clinton, where the middle class made huge gains, most being able to buy a home for the first time, interest rates were low, we created a SURPLUS, and talked about a “Peace dividend”. This of course was abhorrent to the Military industrial complex, which practically starved until they got one of their own and his puppet boy back into the White House. It was shocking how quickly it all came apart. The last thing, the VERY LAST THING the Clinton White House did, was to warn about Bin Laden, and his plans to attack, and to stay on top of this.
Granted not all of Clintons policies were a resounding success, but all I hear about from the Sander’s campaign are the 20-20 hindsight “failures” of Pres. Clinton, and how it was Hillary’s fault. A basis of supply side AND demand side economics stipulates that “WARS are recessionary” by their nature, when they end, a cycle concludes with them. This may be why the Bush regime wanted to maintain a perpetual state of war, among other reasons.
I for one am looking forward to Clintonomics II. Or Obama III. Whatever you call it, progress was real, tangible, incremental and structured to outlast a recession and benefit the maximum number of middle class possible.
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Actually that figure is 16% in the US, 32% in Denmark. Denmark is a prosperous country so their relatively big public sector does not seem to be inhibiting economic growth.
The question of whether 32% public employment is too high cannot be answered without looking at what these workers are doing. In other countries services as electrical utilities and power generation and health care are provided by public entities thus resulting in a larger government sector. The assumption that government agencies are less efficient in delivering these goods is nonsense.
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So? The US youth unemployment rate for the same period was 10.3%.
The thing is, anything good Clinton would propose is just as DOA in a Republican Congress as anything Sanders would propose. The only way Clinton would get anything done is by doing what her husband did in the 1990s- adopting big chunks of the conservative agenda and claiming they were hers all along. That would only continue American government’s slide to the right. Sanders, at worst, leaves us no worse off than Clinton at her BEST.
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But what have they amounted to? Take Obamacare, for example. It was (and is) certainly better than nothing, but it could have been much better. It was watered down, down further, and then down even more, but still never got a single Republican vote – not one. That was entirely predictable, since Mitch McConnell had, for all to hear, advised Republicans to oppose anything Obama proposed, so as to deny him any bipartisan achievements. In that environment, and with (at the time) enough Democratic votes to work with, why not go for the whole hog, i.e., single payer? If Democrats could pass the Rube Goldberg healthcare bill we actually wound up with, they surely could have passed something as simple and appealing as that. And why stop with healthcare? Why not a more ambitious, and perhaps even adequate, stimulus package? (In Obama’s defense, there was the Max Baucus factor to contend with – the Blue Dogs and other Republican-lite Democrats in Congress. But was any real pressure applied – any effort made to goad them in the direction of something more ambitious? Imagine what LBJ would have done in like circumstances.)
Hillary is more realistic, not going around the country proposing free college tuition, for example.
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It’s not a zero sum argument. Only one candidate promises to give away the store.
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You’re ready to pay approximately half your income in federal taxes, I assume.
Yeah, if my kids could have free college, if I knew that no one couldn´t afford healthcare, if I knew I wouldn´t end up in some old age hellhole, if I knew that my fellow citizens weren´t starving, or living under bridges … wouldn´t you?
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Yes, I would support a more socialized form of government. Thanks for the candor.
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There is always a huge difference between having a Democrat or a Republican as President. Since World War II:
-Twice as many jobs were created under Democrats as Republicans
-The Unemployment rate has gone down under nearly every Democrat and up under nearly every Republican
-The debt goes up much more quickly under Republicans and
-The GDP does better under Democrats.
So, if having a job and a healthy economy matters to you, vote for the Democrat and stop complaining about them.
Everybody in every presidential election begs to hear the candidates’ “ideas.” Which once articulated can thenceforth be articulated by every opposing candidate in either party. Articulated ideas belong exclusively to the idea’s author until AFTER the election and AFTER their team is fully formed to create a working Executive Office. Stop asking for articulation.
Listen to the idea differences put forth by all candidates and give them - and the very power of the presidential office - credit for pulling together an executive team that’ll work to execute promised changes.
President Obama is living proof that this is how things get done - even with a Congressional “brick wall” to hurdle.